If you’ve ever seen the 1960’s live-action Batman TV show, you’ll know that one of the defining characteristics of the show was its use of comic-book style words overlaying the action scenes, a technique pioneered in comic books by Roy Crane:

It was Crane who pioneered the use of onomatopoeic sound effects in comics, adding “bam,” “pow” and “wham” to what had previously been an almost entirely visual vocabulary. Crane had fun with this, tossing in an occasional “ker-splash” or “lickety-wop” along with what would become the more standard effects. Words as well as images became vehicles for carrying along his increasingly fast-paced storylines.

Ah, the good old days: when computers were chunky, the Internet was a dream of the future, and you could make a cup of coffee while waiting for a screenful of text to display. If you miss that as much as I do, let me introduce you to Slow, a low bit rate emulator that lets you travel back in time to those simpler days.

Slow lets you run commands with a reduced output character rate. For example, we can ask for the date at speeds of 50, 75, and 110 bps: